Thursday, February 22, 2007

Who I am

I thought I had like five readers of this blog. Appearantly this isn't so. I seem to have readers I've never heard of. This is a pleasant surprise.

So, I figured none of these new people would know much about me. Many of the readers I thought I had have known me for years. So here's a quick explanaton of who I am.

I'm 19, white, male, agnostic-atheist, living in Florida, moving to New Hampshire with the Free State Project, with no more credentials than a high school diploma. I had no formal education in philosophy or logic whatsoever, and my formal economic education was nine weeks in a typical economics class where Keynesianism was taught (Keynesianism is a load of bull). Like most of what I know, I taught myself. I work in the back of a KFC washing dishes and live in a trailer park where I'm leeching wifi on my father's laptop for my internet access. Not proud of it but this is who I am.

I've been kinda libertarian all my life, mostly wanting to be left alone, thinking my conservative parents' ideas about gays and such was completely stupid, and I pretended to be Christian, although I was a deist for most of my life. I call myself an agnostic-atheist because while I reject all religion as a load of BS, I think a deist type of god is possible, even though there's no reason to believe or assume it exists.

I discovered libertarianism as such on December 28th, 2005. About a year ago. I figured "I'm 18 now, maybe I should look into politics to see who to vote for." I came across the World's Smallest Political Quiz. I ended up voting libertarian on everything except drugs, which I was unsure of. When I found the result of being extremely libertarian, I knew where to look for the rest of my politics. The last record I have of me identifying my political beliefs before using "anarchist" was March 6.

Before then, I already understood the stupidity of both political parties, but I called myself a "Republican" because Republicans were a little more individualistic than Democrats. Keep in mind, I knew and cared not what "individualism" and "collectivism" even meant, but I understood the concepts in a kinda fuzzy sense and would have considered myself individualistic.

I've always known that people were stupid. I've spent a lot of time arguing with people over silly things, and once I discovered what I call debating sports, I was addicted. In the year before I found libertarianism, I spent half of my time debating console fanboys. So I'd gotten a taste for arguing with people and was well aware of many of the fallacies I deal with on a regular basis.

Reading through the LP platform (Pre-LRC-bastardization), I saw the policy on secession. It read like "We support the right of individuals and states and communities to secede". I thought about this, and I realized that consistent libertarianism was anarchism. At that point, the other legos fell into place and I became an anarcho-capitalist. I don't know exactly when this was, but it was obviously after March 6, 2006 and before April 27, 2006, which is the first record I have of being called an anarchist.

Many of the things I write here are not so much me explaining what I know, it's a part of my journey through discovering libertarianism, which as I said, has taken place over the past year. It's me putting in words things that I've always known, but never been able to explain. I recall describing what I do on my blog to one friend as "Taking what you already know as a fuzzy concept and putting it in words that make it clear to you." As I come to any realization or clarification, I'll normally post something about it here. In this sense, maybe it's good that I've never taken a formal lesson in any of these things, it lets me start from the perspective of a reader that hasn't either, and I think they're the largest pool of potential libertarians that would be receptive to my message. And that may be why I've gotten any readership other than my known friends.

Because this is the documentation of the process of me discovering libertarianism, some of my more recent work may be in contradiction to some of my earlier posts. Not glaringly so, but partially. I'm not contradicing myself, so much as changing my mind as I realize I was either wrong or was using a word incorrectly, which is something to be expected during the process of discovery, right? I'm hoping that the things I write will help to reinforce anarchocapitalists, draw libertarians to anarchocapitalism, and make libertarians of nonlibertarians.

A few of my major influences are Rothbard and the Austrian School of Economics, Robert LeFevre, Marc Stevens (Author of Adventures in Legal Land), who led me to Lysander Spooner, George Orwell, a little Stefan Molyneux, a little of Ayn Rand, and much of my libertarian entertainment is a product of Free Talk Live. If you read or listen to some of these people, you'll see exactly what parts of each of these I combined to form my perspective.

4 Comments:

It seems we deconverted from statism about the same time - I started actually calling myself a Market Anarchist last September.

I also am 19, and planning on moving to New Hampshire when I'm through with college, so perhaps one day we'll run into each other.

I found my way to libertarianism and then anarcho-capitalism through Francois Tremblay of the Hellbound Alleee Network, then found the community on Graveyard of the Gods, and from there was turned on to Teh Radical Libertarian blog and Stefan Molyneauz's Freedomain Radio.

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